Mandrake (17 page)

After a long pause, Queston said: ‘The first thing we’ll do is look for some breakfast.’ He was smiling. He rolled himself in blankets and lay down.

‘Good night,’ she said.

‘Good night, Miss Summers.’

She said sleepily: ‘My name’s Beth.’

‘Mine’s David.’

He lay waiting for the sleep that rolled up towards him. He wondered, faintly jealous, who had presented her with the tired little aphorism. He thought again of the conviction that he had tried to turn into comprehensible words, and grinned again at her reaction. Trust a woman. If you introduced her to the Angel of Death, she’d invite him to stay to tea. And then he turned back to the greatest enigma of all, that he had glossed lightly over in his big words: the single figure whose part in it all was not what it appeared to be, who had a power of his own greater than any puppet could have, however strong a force manipulated him. Mandrake. Mandrake… He did not sleep for a long time.

It happened very soon, and afterwards he wondered that it had not happened before.

They decided that they would drive through the dead lands for as long as it was possible to drive, looking for others like themselves. It had not seemed important to him before; until she came, he had not thought any others could exist. He discovered, after a little while, why she was frightened of the Ministry police. If they found her, she said, they would take her back to the Guild of Women, Mandrake’s second brainchild: and she told him more about it than Lindsey had done. Like him, she described it vaguely as fostering all the old instincts that glorified the home. But she said too that any unattached woman found by the Guild now, in the enclosed towns, was forced either to marry or to take on another equally traditional function.

‘They aren’t exactly brothels,’ she said calmly. ‘The basic idea seems to be that if a man isn’t getting enough of it at home, he can go off to one of these without having an affair with someone and breaking up the family. But something else goes on there that’s really nasty… a sort of ceremony at set times of the year, like Midsummer and Christmas. They never managed to get me inside one of the houses, and I don’t know quite what goes on. But I heard enough. They make it all sound very moral and necessary… that’s why I was running away.’

He knew, by his horror, what was happening to him. A month ago, the fate of these unhappy wandering females would have left him indifferent, even amused. But that it might have happened to her—

He had known nothing like her before. She seemed able to forget in a moment the enormity of what had overtaken them, and lose herself in the details of living. Her gaiety dazed him, as if he had been a long time asleep. She bubbled with conspiratorial delight when they found a deserted garage or shop, and helped themselves to fuel, clothes and food; with the scarlet coat wrapped close round her, against the cold that grew more intense now every day, she moved gracefully across his horizons so that he set her tasks of her own for the pleasure of seeing her walk.

She spoke to him with a grateful respect that made him feel worn and old. The smile that had first startled him lit her face often, but never brought her close. He wondered gloomily if she thought of him as a man at all, or at least as anything but a kind of benevolent uncle. His consciousness of her flared so much more vividly every day that it became a precious agony to have her beside him as they drove through the empty streets, or slept in deserted rooms. He took great care not to touch her. Only once, when he woke in the night and sat watching her for a long while as she slept, he put out his hand and touched the curious bronze hair that fell away from her face.

The next day they were on the outskirts of Reading, where the dead lands of Berkshire stretched round in a wide circular belt. Something seemed to be drawing him westwards, gradually away from London. They were driving with a purpose now; Beth had cut her hand on a tin-opener the day before, leaving a wound that was clean but a dark, angry red; and Queston had decided, before something worse happened, on a search for some kind of medical supplies.

In street after street of identical red-box houses they drew a blank; the places had been methodically stripped, and nothing remained. They drove farther into the country, and saw among the fields a cluster of houses and shops huddling on their own, away from the main road. From such a place, generally, a gun-shot or a stone from some unseen watchful source would drive them back even before they hit the familiar barrier of place, and they would know they had found one of the fierce, isolated little communities which astonishingly seemed to survive alone in every part. But this time nothing happened as they approached.

Queston stopped the Lagonda a hundred yards from the first house and got out, carrying his shot-gun.

‘Turn the car round. I shouldn’t be long, it looks as if we’re lucky. But if there’s someone there, and they see me, I’ll fire a shot. If you hear that, drive back round the corner and wait, and if I’m not with you inside ten minutes then drive like hell back to the house where we were last night. And then I’ll get there somehow. All right?’

She nodded, pushing her hair aside with one hand. Her face was strained; he thought suddenly that she looked much older than she had done. The childishness had gone. She had argued with him urgently, too, over the idea of trying small unpredictable villages like this one; it wasn’t worth it, she insisted, bandages and aspirin were a sophistication they could do without. But Queston had brusquely cut her short; her hand worried him, and he had a horror of the idea that something worse might overtake her and he be left unable to help. There was danger even in the water they drank: long boiled, but drawn from long-static tanks in houses where always he suspected disease might lurk.

He left her, and walked gingerly up the road through the long wet grass that masked its kerb. The responsibility he felt for her was unfamiliar; he had never known anxiety on anyone else’s behalf, even when he was a child. But there was another difference; he had never secretly nursed any real emotion for a woman either, the plunder had always been easy. This time—

He clung to his freedom now because it was hers; and it troubled him that his protection carried danger for her all the time. The Ministry were on the look-out for him, he knew now; twice in the last week, driving fast along unfamiliar roads, he had seen men shout in recognition after the car. Once another car had chased them, but fell back as it reached some invisible boundary line. He held his gun ready as he walked.

But the village was empty. He saw the overgrown gardens as he approached; tiles loose on the roofs, a telegraph pole leaning wearily at an angle, pulling the wires taut. He smelt the first shop before he saw it, and then drew level with the rotting heap behind its broken window. ‘J. Pennyquick, Fruiterer’, said the notice above, in paint that had already peeled. At least, he thought, the stench meant that the place had not been cleared.

In a general store near by he found bandages, cottonwool, antiseptic; and he filled a bag with tins of food. His spirits rose. Last time, the tins they foraged had been unlabelled, and they had been living on baked beans for two days now.

He went out through the back of the shop and crossed a field towards the road. The grass was long and the hedges straggled. The fields everywhere still had the look of controlled land, the shape given them by farming, but their lines had begun to blur a little; so that at first sight always they gave an uneasiness, a sense that something was intangibly wrong.

Within a few steps he put up a rabbit; the white tail bounced frantically ahead, and instinctively he dropped the bag, pulled up his gun and fired. He missed. The rabbit vanished. Remorse flashed into his mind as he remembered the signal for Beth; now she would have ten minutes unnecessary panic. And he would have to walk an extra quarter of a mile to find her. Serve him right.

Then he heard the running footsteps, and her voice.

‘David! David!’

Her face was plain with fright, and her hair tangled with running. She stumbled to a halt, staring at him, gasping for breath. She said indistinctly: ‘You’re all right!’ and burst into tears, and he put out his arms with no more passion than he would have done to a child, until the feel of her there broke into him. He held her tightly, feeling the jerk of her gulps for breath, and rubbed his cheek against her hair. Her arms round his waist clutched as if they would never let go. ‘Darling,’ he said. ‘Beth, my darling love, it’s all right. It’s all right.’

He drew her away from him at last, holding her by the shoulders, and she bent her head, sniffing, to hide her face. ‘I heard a shot.’ She gave a comic, hiccuping sob. ‘I thought they’d caught you.’

‘I told you to drive out of sight if they did.’

‘I’m sorry.’

She looked up at him, with wet, flushed cheeks and reddening eyes, offering the plainness as penance.

‘O Beth,’ Queston said. ‘Beth. Beth.’

Then he was kissing her, and the world was not the same as it had been before.

That evening, driving westward a spiralling way to avoid towns, they came on a hillside north of Chippenham that rose smooth green before them with a dozen small square shapes clustered in one field. Beth stiffened.

‘David, look!’

Queston had been driving only half-alert, rejoicing in the weight of her body curled against his side. He slowed the car, and kissed the top of her head.

‘What?’

‘Why didn’t we think of it before? It’s the obvious thing to have. No roots, no ties. It need never stay in one place. A caravan.’

The caravans were huddled together in a corner of the field, in a litter of crackling brown leaves from the two great elms that overshadowed them out of the hedge. He chose the largest that he thought the Lagonda could easily pull, and unscrewed the padlock on the door. Sheltered from the wind, the walls and roof were weathered but still sound; inside, to Beth’s delight, it was equipped as if the owner had left only five minutes before. She ran from one end to the other, burrowing in drawers and cupboards, like a child with a new toy.

‘Sheets. And china, and knives and forks. How long is it since you used a real fork? And a sweet little kitchen, and it’s even got a bathroom. How can a caravan have a bathroom? O David, it’s marvellous. The carpet’s so soft. And there’s a cupboard full of things like
pate de foie
and lobster,
look’—
she waved a tin at him. ‘And flour, I can make some bread.’

‘And bottles of malt whisky,’ Queston said thoughtfully. He had found a miniature bar behind a sliding panel. He pulled out a fat bottle, and blinked at it. ‘And champagne.’

Beth said wonderingly: ‘They must have been terribly rich.’

He grinned. ‘I expect they came here for illicit orgies at the week-end.’

‘Suppose they come back?’

‘Does it feel inhabited? I’d bet they’ve been in Scotland for the last three months.’

She smiled brilliantly again, and bounced on one of the beds. ‘Let’s have our own orgy. We’ll light the paraffin heater to keep warm, and draw the curtains, and eat all the most horribly indigestible tins. And drink lots of champagne.’ She giggled at him, and as he laughed and came towards her he said: ‘And make love.’

It was the thought that had been shouting from both of them, and then they were not laughing any more.

In the five days while they stayed in the caravan, in the field where they had found it with the cluster of flat roofs silent and strangely companionable all round, he began to feel that he had never properly been alive before. Open now to a delight free of wariness, he knew himself involved, dependent, careless of the danger of trust. Small details of Beth’s body sent him giddy with an amazement that went through and beyond desire: the ripple of the fine skin over her hips, the soft curve from breast to arm, a thread of a scar that tilted one eyebrow. And the tenderness of their enclosure in the house that was one room gave him for the first time the old longing, new in him, for stability, peace to grow together—until he remembered the world they were in, where movement was their only salvation and that not perhaps for long.

Or until the sight or nearness of her roused him, or she came seeking him with a half-astonished shamelessness, and the fierceness held them again.

She said sleepily one day, as they lay quiescent: ‘I’ve never been so happy ever. I wish the world would stop. I wish we could just go on living here like this for always.’

‘Not altogether like this. We should die of exhaustion.’

‘Should we? ’ She ran one finger delicately along the side of his thigh.

The shudder flowed through him like warmth. ‘And if you do that again—’

‘Should we? Are we unusual? ’ She turned to lie across his chest, looking at him inquiringly, and he grinned at the solemn surprise on her face, the hair tousled in damp curls round it now. The childishness was an appearance, hiding a sensuality that had astounded him with pleasure in her, but still it existed on its own like something she had outgrown but not totally shed.

‘Some people would say so. I’m a staid middle-aged man, remember. And here I am behaving like an intemperate youth. Rather more so, in fact. And feeling marvellous.’ He kissed her forehead, and she lay back with a naive pride that made him smile.

‘It’s being together all the time, every minute, that’s so glorious. I don’t just mean making love. I’ve never lived with a man, at least not really.’

‘What d’you mean, not really? ’ Queston felt a cold flick of fear. This was the other side of it; the other fire that had blazed alight in him, that even in passion for a woman he had never felt before. He wanted more than her body. For a long time, on only the second day, they had remorsefully detailed their past loves, each unwillingly begging to hear the worst. He had started it, he remembered. He had asked the first questions. Beth had only copied him, without the same compulsion; she had not really wanted to know. But he had burned to hold every moment of her, past as well as future, and he had interrogated her unmercifully; and felt each shock of revelation bitterly, illogically, as a betrayal.